How Elie Hassenfeld started their web page design journey

Company name

GiveWell

Overview

GiveWell is a nonprofit aimed at helping people accomplish as much good as possible with their donations. We find outstanding charities and publish the full details of our analysis to help donors decide where to give.

Our current website is at http://www.givewell.net. We want to create a new look that is clean, readable, and professional (and not flashy or "slick"). Our website is about cutting through the emotional manipulation of traditional fundraising, and getting people substantive facts and analysis so they can accomplish real, tangible good.

We run Drupal and are looking for a new theme for the existing content. The full prize is for designs of 2 pages. Mockups should include a new version of:

Please start by just creating the homepage. During the contest, we’ll provide feedback, and if we like what you’ve done with the homepage, you can submit your design for the other page by the deadline. We don’t want you to do any unnecessary work.

Tell us a bit about who you are and the people you reach

Individual donors seeking to accomplish more with their charitable donation. Our users tend to be younger (25-40), educated, and earn enough to give $100-$100,000 to charity each year.

• We are open to the idea of making the site more colorful and engaging via the use of images, but we don't want to look like a traditional charity site with emotionally manipulative pictures of people in need. We want our site to communicate that we are getting serious information to serious people.
• We aren’t partial to any color, but we would prefer to retain the purple in the current logo. See the upper left-hand corner of http://www.givewell.net

Homepage

We’re open to different approaches to this page: (A) keeping the layout basically as is but improving the look, (B) rearranging the primary items (e.g., Top charities bubble, Key research findings, Tagline and blurb, email list signup) on the page, or (C) adding new items/images to the page. We think the prime contenders for addition to the homepage are either our list of top charities (currently at http://www.givewell.net/top-charities) or an image.